Exerpt from press release for TAIPEI DANGDAI 2024 exhibition: "Rumi Tsuda and Michael Rosch more explicitly combine Eastern and Western visual traditions into their works. Tsuda, who was born in Japan and lived in New York beginning in 1980, created her monumental Manhattan Peace Shrine based on people she encountered on the subway. Over a period of three years, Tsuda used diligent observation to represent individuals making up the city, celebrating the multicultural metropole. Taking the shape of Manhattan and representing local New Yorkers on individual pieces of wood, the work nonetheless engages with Eastern aesthetics, as the artist included 108 portraits as a reference to the sacred number in Dharmic religions and tops the work with a self-portrait rendered as a low-relief carving, reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks."